Sixteen Volts

Normally, leftists are very enthusiastic when they get to prove the innocence of some death row convict with DNA evidence. And I agree with this enthusiasm, since there shouldn't be anything controversial or political in drawing the correct logical inference from the two premises (1) the DNA collected on the scene necessarily belongs to the real killer and (2) that DNA does not belong to the person who is accused of or was convicted of the crime. However, I have to wonder how long this enthusiasm for DNA evidence will continue now that "DNA Testing Finds No Match in Duke Lacrosse Case". Not very long, I bet.

Myself, I never really had a problem of believing that the three Duke fratboys had actually raped the black stripper. Rapes do happen and drunken fratboys can be nasty and violent, so perhaps the Duke lacrosse case was a genuine gang rape that just happened to get major publicity from leftists since the defendants are rich and white, that is, evil. But seeing how much the leftoids have already invested emotionally in this case, I can't deny that it wouldn't be hilarious if the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. Oh, that screaming and gnashing of teeth would be like music.

With respect to DNA, there is one additional thing that I don't understand here. Predictably, feminists are already crying that the lack of DNA evidence doesn't prove anything, since the rapists could have used a condom. True, but if so, when the forensic investigators collected DNA samples from all 46 white players who were present at the party, what did they compare these samples to? There must have been some foreign DNA traces on the stripper, since otherwise there would have been no point in taking DNA samples from the players, right? And if these traces of DNA on the stripper must have come (pun not intended) from the rapists and they don't match the DNA of any of the players, isn't the logical conclusion here pretty much inescapable?

Speaking of rape, another rape trial that is described in the news article "A Highly Charged Rape Trial Tests South Africa's Ideals" might turn out to be a tough nut for all the cultural relativists out there:

Taking the stand for the first time this week in the rape trial, Mr. Zuma cast himself as the embodiment of a traditional Zulu male, with all the privileges that patriarchal Zulu traditions bestow on men. Mr. Zuma, who turns 64 this week, said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advocate, had signaled a desire to have sex with him by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with legs crossed, revealing her thigh.

Indeed, he said, he was actually obligated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and "in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready." To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape.

We might be quick to condemn this man for his culture, but before we do, please remember, who are we to judge other cultures or to say that their ways are somehow "worse"? Our Western linear thinking is just one possibility of organizing a society, and it is no better or worse than any others, regardless of what we privileged white oppressors might believe. Or if any comparison is possible, we are worse.

Many other cultures certainly know how to find, convict and punish criminals and other evildoers in a way that is more communal and does not follow our needless insistence on individual liberties and freedoms, which in reality are nothing but the white male patriarchal oppressors' tools to perpetuate their oppression. After all, as has been aptly noted recently, an "I" can only exist within a "we". For example, the whole village can participate in the stoning of a condemned lawbreaker and this way strengthen its feelings of community. There is power in the collective, and justice ought to be dispensed on a collective basis.

In one possible future, such ways of thinking and dispensing justice might soon spread into our Western societies. We have already seen what happens when young Muslim immigrant men encounter European and especially Nordic women and their... less modest ways of behaviour and dress. Dan Simmons was recently visited by the ghost of the Christmas future, an event that he describes in his essay "April 2006 Message from Dan".

The majority of Western progressives seem to understand and accept that in the great scheme of things, they are the oppressors who have no right to criticize other cultures since everything that is "wrong" in them is in the end their fault. I will probably never tire of pointing out the double standard that loudly condemns a white man as a despicable bigot for feeling queasy when he sees two men kissing, but is then totally quiet and nonjudgemental about another culture in which gay men are put to death simply for being gay. I guess that this is the logical end result of the leftist worldview, but just for the sake of consistency and honesty, I would hope that they dropped the double standard on what they demand and expect from different people.

However, when I was just sitting on the subway yesterday and letting my mind wonder, I suddenly understood in a flash of insight how this is connected to the fact that for feminists, rape is the ultimate crime. As is constantly pounded into our heads, rape is infinitely worse than any other crime, including murder, and all men must be collectively punished for the rape culture that they benefit from. Glaivester already explained in "Rape Is About Sex! Duh!" why feminists must necessarily proclaim that rape is about violence, not sex. But this doesn't explain why feminists have to proclaim rape to be much worse than any other crime and be so loud and single-minded about it. Sociobiology 101 would easily explain why being raped is so horribly devastating for a woman, but since feminists generally deny that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have any validity whatsoever, we have to look for other explanations. However, the other possible answer to this question turns out to be surprisingly simple when you think about it and explain a lot.

One of the basic tenets of modern feminism is that white college-educated wimyn's-studies-majoring daddy's girls are just as oppressed as their poorer sisters in the lower socioeconomic classes and in the less developed parts of the world. The poor and unenlightened Third World cacao picker who makes it possible for the obese Western feminist to enjoy the sweet taste of chocolate might see things a little bit differently. I'm certain that this must be a source of significant internal tension and conflict within the movement that tries to pay lip service to being "inclusive". Fortunately, the patriarchal "rape culture" and the axiomatically equal probability of all wimyn everywhere becoming rape victims in the hands of evil oppressor males provides the Western feminists a comfortable escape hatch, once we assume that rape is an infinitely evil crime worse than murder.

Well, maybe the white middle-class feminist lives in a material luxury and enjoys individual freedoms that the vast majority of women and men couldn't even dream of and is therefore objectively better off and less oppressed. But since all women everywhere are infinitely oppressed by the patriarchal rape culture, all women everywhere are also equally oppressed by men regardless of the other circumstances or considerations. All wimyn can thus join hands and scream as equals in their eternal fight and neverending war against their common oppressor, and the Western feminists don't have to give up their chocolate bars or put their socialist ideas of equality to actual practice. (Socialism is fun about only as long as you get to be the one who takes and redistributes, after all.)

Even better, even the most wretched and worst-off man begging in some ditch is the patriarchal oppressor next to the materially well-off Western middle-class feminist, which liberates the latter of any moral or other responsibilities for the former. Once you get to count the ultimate act of oppression in your column, lesser differences do not really make any difference in the bottom line. We get to a seemingly paradoxical situation once noted by Panu that if a young and beautiful right-wing female MP wants to completely eliminate the welfare payments of poor loser men who have fallen out of the mainstream society, she still gets to be the oppressed victim and these men are her structural oppressors simply because they wield the phallic power of being able to rape her.

The same observation might also explain the enthusiasm of feminists to loudly scream that they are rape victims: it is a great way to collect essentially free but valuable and undeniable victim-of-oppression points and establish ideological cred. It's funny how often it seems to turn out that these rapes were never reported to police (note that this conveniently proves your core ideology that says that justice system is rotten to the core), and how often the alleged rapist was conveniently a wealthy white male, that is, the ultimate ideological oppressor. This is possible, sure, but statistically a bit unlikely for my tastes, so I would tend to be skeptical of many of these cases. Can't say which particular ones, of course, but the overall trend would suggest that there is a lot of posing going on.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 at 1:35 PM